xviii Introduction Readers of Americans at War may wonder about our selection criteria. The selections aim to provide a representative sample to enhance understanding of what war means. The entries show the thoughts and emotions of Americans who engaged in combat. We do not claim that our coverage offers a comprehensive history of America’s conflicts. Rather, the selections strive to cover events both large and small in order to provide a sense of what war is like as it is seen by Americans who have experienced it at the sharp end. The 10 entries for Pearl Harbor represent 10 survivors who knew that they had just experienced something enor- mous. Likewise, numerous other accounts describe historically significant engagements. But many veterans experienced combat at times and places that no historian would label important. Private Morgan Hall relates one such event in Iraq, calling it “just a tiny little skirmish in the big picture.”6 When the enemy opens fire, it matters little to the participants whether the fight is part of a memo- rable field battle or an ambush involving a mere handful of people. In either case, the experience of confronting death in battle is immediate and real. Until very recent times, American policy makers have excluded women from taking part in combat. Consequently, Americans at War mostly speaks with male voices. Also largely excluded are noncombat voices. Service men and women who labored in rear-echelon units, the great majority in modern armies, occasionally came under hostile fire. Representative accounts are provided, from such participants as Alwyn Inness-Brown, who served with the American Field Service in World War I Will Judy, who served in the same war as a field clerk in the U.S. Army’s 33rd Division and Lieutenant Ruth Erickson, who was a nurse at the Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. Modern American wars against regional insurgencies have blurred the line between combatant and noncombatant as the insurgents deliberately target road convoys and base areas. Select entries for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan depict the harrowing experience of confronting ambushes and Improvised Explosive Devices while operating in the supposedly secure rear. At the end of the day, reliance upon primary sources, including eyewitness accounts, occasion- ally causes frustrating uncertainties. Yet it seems the best way to avoid producing what Napoleon called a mere “agreed upon fiction.” All of the transcripts retain the original language. Some of this language may be uncomfortable for the modern reader. Nonetheless, in order to preserve an individual’s authentic voice, we have chosen to leave the language unchanged. Language is precious. Language reflects attitudes. To omit potentially uncomfortable language is to deny the reader the chance to understand more deeply the nature of conflict as expressed in its most lethal place, the battlefield. The decision to retain the original language means repeating slang terms. Consider the word “jarheads,” a word long associated with the U.S. Marines that appears in several excerpts. It may appear to be an offensive label. Indeed, it was meant to be such. The backstory begins around 1900 when U.S. Navy sailors invented a word to be used as a derog- atory reference to the Marines. Instead of being insulted, the Marines loved it. Having failed once to insult the Marines, during World War II sailors tried again by calling the Marines “jarheads.” This label referred to how the high collar on the Marine Dress Blues uniform made a Marine’s head look like it was sticking out of the top of a canning jar. Marines were still not insulted. Instead, they embraced the new moniker as a term of utmost respect. Then there are various labels fighting men use to describe the enemy. In the two World Wars, American fighting men often referred to their German enemies as “squareheads.” Broadly, this referred to a physical characteristic of the Teutonic race. In World War I they also commonly used the term “Hun” and in World War II, “Jerry.” In the same vein, Americans fighting the Japanese called their foes “Nips” (referring to Japanese term for their own country, “Nippon”) or “Japs.” Dur- ing the Vietnam War, Americans initially engaged a force of Vietnamese Communists, or Viet Cong. The word “Cong” made many think of the fearsome film creature, King Kong. To help relieve the anxiety associated with such a frightening image, combat soldiers invented other labels to describe their foe. The most common was “Charlie,” derived from the practice of using “Victor Charlie” instead of “VC” or Viet Cong in radio transmissions in order to ensure the clarity of the message.
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